Leonard Cohen: Album by Album Thread

Wow. Very interesting to read that review and think just how differently people hear music. I suppose at that particular moment in time with a certain set of expectations and a certain weariness about some production trends in popular music, I can imagine someone thinking this record might seem over produced, but that reaction is so far from the discipline and restraint I hear in the arrangements that it's almost laughable! At least Lissauer's work on "Who By Fire" got through to him.

It'a also interesting that he misheard "oppressed by the figures of beauty." "Obsessed" doesn't even make any sense in that context, although it makes for a ready made cliche to use in a review.....

L.

 

Thanks. I don't have any evidence that Cohen intended it, but there are other instances of what look like deliberate toying with patterns in the running order of the albums (I pointed out another one in my discussion of the first side of the first album earlier in the thread). In any case, noticing the possible pattern got me thinking in what I hope are productive ways about the thematic interplay of the songs on the record, my sense that it's all of a piece, although not with the same kind of striking coherence that I think SOLAH has.

L.

 

I'm behind on this thread. Apologies to @lschwart and @PhantomStranger for this brief tangent, but I've posted some first impressions on the new Live in Dublin set in the thread dedicated to it. Since I'll be watching the Blu-ray for the first time next week with company, I've only listened to a handful of my "desert island" songs. Only two on that set come from songs we've gotten to in this thread, so I thought I'd excerpt those slight observations here. I've gone into more (sketchy) rambling detail on the other songs than these.

Bird on the Wire:
This performance's lyrics are a hybrid of the original version (restoring the bridge about the be-crutched man, and the woman in the darkened door) but does incorporate some of his other changes to the song's lyrics.

Suzanne:
The only live version of this that has never worked for me is Isle of Wight, 1970. I'm a fan of his general philosophy of not attempting to reinvent this song. A major side effect is that this version, while excellent, is simply consistent with recent renditions. From the first time I listened to this performance, though, I noticed more empathetic accompaniment. The fiddled instrumental interlude preceding the third stanza is a welcome embellishment.



Okay. Now, I'm going back to read what I've interrupted! [Note: my limited familiarity with New Skin will likely limit my active participation but I'm already fascinated by what I've read about it and I'm devouring every word.]

 

I usually take great interest when Dylan shuffles and reshuffles his lyrics over the years. I like ALL the "Tangled Up in Blue" lyric variations. But, for me, the "Bird on the Wire" rewrite really damages the song. Leonard can do as he pleases, most certainly, and surely HE sees the value in the variant lyrics. To me, the variant lyrics undercut the entire spirit of the song - about freedom (including freedom to be wrong, or to fail). Since I only said "for me" and "to me", let me add, IMHO and YMMV.

 

Given how much more I've come to love New Skin for the Old Ceremony having spent so much time immersing myself in it over the past few weeks, I'm delighted to see that it's represented by 4 songs on the new Dublin set:

Who By Fire
Lover Love Lover
Chelsea Hotel #2
I Tried to Leave You

That argues for its continuing centrality to Cohen's sense of his total output.

L.

 

He's constantly included those songs in his live repertoire over the years. His band has used a number of different arrangements for Who By Fire over time. What started out as a solemn-sounding prayer has become a far more elaborate song over the years.

Lover Lover Lover from Berlin, 1974

 

I'm just glad he's out there still working for our smile. And that the song still rises pure and free (even if he doesn't always sing that lyric anymore).

The eastern sound of "Lover Lover Lover" and "Who By Fire" has ripened since Cohen first really started expanding that aspect of his sound with "Recent Songs" and the tour that followed. More on that when the time comes.

L.

 

I hope everyone has been listening to New Skin For the Old Ceremony on its preferred format, 8-Track.

 

One of the very first recorded performances of The Traveler in 1966. Don't know it? It would be released the next year as The Stranger Song.

 

Since my local shop doesn't have New Skin in stock, I haven't been doing my homework, professors. I have listened to some of the songs live but I feel that out-of-context they don't offer good grist for the mill.

In the next few days I'll update the thread to his next album unless there is dissent.

In the meantime and in the interest of efficiency and not larding the thread with non-album commentary, here's my omnibus response to a few posts.

I'm with you on this. From my vantage, I think Dylan's restive spirit and his grounding in folk music with its documented history of variants makes his songs a more natural fit for his rewrites, both subtle and massive and regardless of how the end results stack up to the originals and/or often vastly different demos. Cohen, on the other hand, I presume (though others familiar with his biography will know better than I can guess), was more book-bound in his formative years. I imagine that gives him a more innately static view of writing, where for Dylan a song is a more living, mercurial thing; a "shining artifact of the past."

Completely off-topic (and hinting at some of my neuroses: ) As to IMHO and YMMV... one of my biggest discomforts with posting thoughtfully is that true analysis is arguably undercut by IMHO, YMMV, etc. but online those are practically necessary with so much potential gulf between intent and inference! Glib posting is easier. Just do my best not to thwack someone as collateral damage.

That is a good set. The first three songs were also represented on his last two live sets, if memory serves. I sometimes wonder what his own approach(es) is/are to devising a setlist. I'm sure he's got a few recipes but sequence is as important in a concert as it is on an album. Of course, you have to vary tempos, arrangments and other auditory concerns but as you pointed out above, he sees his work as documentation. As such, there must be combinations of songs where the text and subtext override for him how he will reassemble the pieces for the evening's performance. In that sense, Dublin is an extra gift in that it is not an after-the-fact assemblage of performances but the document of particular evening.

While I'm automatically drawn to the change in his timbre and phrasing, it is fascinating to see which songs he's chosen to musically embellish (or perhaps deconstruct) through the years -- on top of the occasional lyric changes or omissions.

I'm glad you pointed out the "eastern sound." I couldn't pinpoint it but something in the new performance reminded me of something Hassidic or perhaps east European.

And count me as equally glad that he's out there; partly because of this thread and partly because of the alchemy of real life right now, his work is about the only music I can listen to and concentrate on. Not that I'm not making time for other music now (particularly piano-based and drum-based jazz).

I can't look at the picture on the right and not think that he just had someone tell him, "plastics."

 

“Chelsea Hotel #2” and “Take This Longing”

We’ve already discussed “Chelsea Hotel #2” (and “#1,” as well), so here I mostly have things to say about the song that my schema pairs with it. Both, if we look at them from an autobiographical perspective, are rooted in the period Cohen spent at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in the late ‘60s, and each draws on a different sort of erotic experience connected with that time and place (and connected with Cohen’s experiences with two different woman, Janis Joplin and perhaps Nico—it doesn’t line up with her perfectly, but we do know Cohen wrote the song for her—it’s older than the other songs on the record—and it’s connected to other songs associated with the longing Cohen felt for her and about her—like “One of us Cannot Be Wrong” and others).

In any case, “Chelsea Hotel” is a song about what Cohen’s singer calls in another song from this record (“Why Don’t You Try”) one of “many satisfying one night stands,” although “satisfying” doesn’t really the capture the desolate quality of the memory. For purposes of comparison, however, what matters is the “one nightness” of it and the fact that the woman has made herself available through that night—or some part of it (or some part of a day)—made herself available for the “while,” filled with sex and conversation, before the limousines take her (or him or both of them) away. That singer has made his bed and he lies in it, making the song about the unmade bed and his vivid, but intermittent memory of it. For reasons he’s not sure he understands, he find himself reaching back and singing to this woman now long gone beyond where any limousine might have taken her—except the long last black one.

“Take this Longing,” on the other hand, is a pleading song, a song about an unavailable woman (at least initially, although as we’ll see what she represents will remain unavailable even in her offered availability). And the song begins before any getting into bed or any brave, sweet talk. It’s another song of perfect desolation, but a different desolation. First of all, it’s a song about a woman who is self-evidently beautiful, not oppressed, like the singer and his companion in the other song, by the figures of beauty. She is clearly not a person who needs other means—verbal, musical—to make herself desirable. She just is beautiful—or it might be better to say that she is something like a principle or manifestation of beauty itself. The singer’s account of her (offered to her as part of the pleading) has some lovely bits of concrete particularity (the broken sandal strap and winter clothes, the way he likes to see her naked from the rear, the fact that both of them are involved with other people), but the song also keeps making her a symbol of some uncapturable form or essence of beauty:

Many men have loved the bells
you fastened to the rein,
and everyone who wanted you
they found what they will always want again.
Your beauty lost to you yourself
just as it was lost to them.

This isn’t a beauty that can be had, even if when it’s offered. Yet the singer longs for it, offering what he has to offer—his words, his songs—to get it:

Oh take this longing from my tongue,
whatever useless things these hands have done.
Let me see your beauty broken down
like you would do for one you love.

This image of beauty broken down is interesting. On one level it’s simply (although a little troublingly) an image of violation and access. It doesn’t matter that the violence is self-inflicted, that he asks her to break herself down. This is not just, “break down, come on and give it to me,” tear down the wall between us, come down off that majestic horse with the bells on its bridle, let me have you, but break your beauty for me, break yourself. It’s violating in a strange way. It’s as if the singer knows he couldn’t stand the beauty itself, that it would be too much. He can only “have” it in fragments, in imperfections (a version of the later “crack in everything”), anyway. Her perfection makes him long at a distance, but he knows that if he had it up close, actually offered, he’d still be left longing. The singer knows what we of course also know if we give it a little thought: That the beauty that he wants is not a beauty that can be given like that or at all. The moment it’s broken down, the longing satisfied, it ceases to be what it was, while what it was remains inviolate, lost to everyone concerned, even her. This is why everyone that has ever wanted the woman “found” only “what they will always want again.” They’re in that condition whether they had her or not.

So this is a longing that’s expressed in a plea the fulfillment of which will make no difference. There is no having what she seems to represent. This sense is intensified by the last line of the chorus, which indicates the falseness, the delusion the singer is willing to embrace just to have some imperfect part, which he knows won’t give him what he wants. If she gives him something that is only “like” what she “would give to one she loves,” then it will at two removes from what he wants: It won’t be a true offering of love as part of an ongoing relationship of some kind nor will it be anything like that higher universal beauty he really longs for. It will only be “Make Believe Love,” that Lou Reed album that never got written.

The next verse makes this even plainer and more painful:

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed,
I would like to try your charity
until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me.

Those first two lines are kin to the dour memory of what the woman in “Chelsea Hotel” said to him about making an exception. Then he tells us he’s debased enough to ask for a charity f*&k, in hopes she’ll at some point reciprocate his desire (charity, a kind of giving, turning to greed, a kind of taking and keeping).
In the end, in the next verse, he’s himself a broken city, abandoned by a conquering army he wishes would stay and continue the conquering. That she’s naked suggests he did finally “have” her. He’s left there undone along with her abandoned clothes:

Hungry as an archway
through which the troops have passed,
I stand in ruins behind you,
with your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps.
I love to see you naked over there
especially from the back.

He likes the way she looks from the rear, but that means she’s also turned her back and maybe she’s also already leaving. Then the chorus repeats, and it’s as if it never happened, the longing still there.
In the last verse, before once again repeating his unending longing, he evokes their other relationships and offers to judge what they’ve done, where perhaps she thinks she’s going, and what it all might mean:

You're faithful to the better man,
I'm afraid that he left.
So let me judge your love affair
in this very room where I have sentenced
mine to death.
I'll even wear these old laurel leaves
that he's shaken from his head.

That other man has left (is “afraid” ironic? Is he being snide or is he actually afraid he might actually have gone, meaning that the woman might turn around and stay?). The other man, in any case, seems also to have been a poet (hence the laurel leaves), and the singer says he’ll even offer his judgment (we assume it’s a negative one and a judgment he also aims at himself for what he’s done to some other woman), in the guise of “the poet”—something it seems the better man has shaken off. This is also a promise to do what the song has done, represent what has happened as art, but in a debased and stolen way, pretending to be the better man he knows he’s not, picking up the laurel leaves, only to present the wearing of them as a pose, just another self-interested role he might play for her. Such play-acting at the role of the artist won’t produce a work that offers anything like an objective judgment on what’s happened or confer on it any meaning, except as some fragment of the higher beauty the first verse and the chorus tell remind us we all still long for. The only meaning the song can confer is the twisted one it already has, the useless beauty of this made, dismaying thing. Beauty broken down.

L.

 

I think Take This Longing has been criminally overlooked. I love how Leonard Cohen sang it, the nuance and emotional inflection in his delivery adds a rich, understated elegance. While I had a problem with Leonard naming Joplin as the inspiration for Chelsea Hotel, his public references to Nico as the inspiration for Take This Longing don't bother me nearly as much. If you read the available interviews, Leonard considered Nico an impenetrable mystery, one he was deeply attracted to on some level.

Here is one such performance in 1979 for the song, as he tells the German audience it was written for a German girl. The arrangement is a little more involved, it sounds like a flute has been added.



I will throw in this live version features an altered last verse:

So give your beauty to the wind
Put your pride to rest
You thought I want you to be good
Now you know that I want you to be best
I'll even wear these old laurel leaves
That he's shaken from his head
Just take this longing from my tongue

This is not entirely related but here is an interesting 1999 Salon piece on Leonard Cohen's career.

 

I have yet to absorb whatever it is the differences suggest, but Buffy St Marie recorded an earlier version of this song (or really another song, with which the later one shares a few revised verses). I'd like to know if this is the version or close to it that Cohen originally sang for and offered to Nico. It appeared on her 1971 album, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina. According to the interviews that float around, Cohen seems to have arrived at the retitled New Skin version shortly before recording the album (it's one of those songs that came into focus during his stay in Ethiopia after leaving Israel after the 1973 war). As we can see from PhantomStranger's post above, he continued after recording it (not just in '79, but on the '76 tour as well--and maybe earlier?) to toy with the first half of the final verse, although I'm not sure yet just to what end.

In any case, here are the lyrics to the version sung by St Marie's and a link to a youtube stream of her recording:

Bells

I'm writing this to say goodbye
To what you never should reply
That all of the Lords and Demons that you leave
I stand entirely alone
That is to say your loving me
Would be our only crime

And isn't it a pity
You can see all her beauty clearly
In the midst of some grey city
In the midst of all this love

Many men have loved the bells
You fastened to the rain
And everyone who wanted you
Found what she would always want again
And I'd have been the dust for you
And I'd have been the grass for you

But you tell me with your beauty
You can see her duty clearly
In the midst of New-York-City
In the midst of all my love

Your body like a searchlight
In the prison of my need
Oh I would share your loneliness
And I demand your greed
And everything depends upon
How near you sleep to me

And isn't it a pity
You can see all her duty clearly
In the midst of New-York-City
In the midst of all our love.

I will be writing this
When you are so very young again
That the forests that you burned away
And then sailed away are truly truly gone
I will be waiting where a starfish is your head
And the jewels for your shoulders
Fall through the walls of sand
Fall through the walls of sand.



L.

 

I am not a fan of Buffy's version. I remember once coming across something that broke down the timeline for Take This Longing's genesis, but it's escaping my memory.

http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/81784#heqh7TpLg1yHJwb4.99

Songs of Leonard Cohen has just been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, for whatever that is worth.

27 recordings have been added into the Hall of Fame, which continues "the tradition of preserving and celebrating timeless recordings" and now totals 987 recordings.

With recordings dating as early as 1909 through the late '80s, this year's Grammy Hall Of Fame entries not only represent a diverse collection of influential and historically significant recordings but also reflect the changing climate of music through the decades. These memorable, inspiring and iconic recordings are proudly added to our growing catalogue — knowing that they have become a part of our musical, social, and cultural history.

 

I can't say I'm all that fond of it either. For me it's a combination of her singing style, which feels overwrought to me, and the version of the song itself, which doesn't have the clarity and the effect of intimacy that the New Skin version has. It's an even more striking contrast than the one between the 2 versions of "Chelsea Hotel."

The honors just keep stacking up!

L.

 

While I was gathering some thoughts on "Lover Lover Lover" and "Who By Fire," I noticed something maybe interesting, maybe just odd.

For a long time I misheard the first few lines of "Take This Longing" as:

Many men have loved the belt
you fastened to the rain [italics mine]

Which always seemed to make a satisfyingly surreal sort of sense without really making much sense at all. I later discovered that Cohen sings "bells" and "rein" ("belt" was just my mondagreem, and "rain" my mistaking of the homonym), and of course that makes much clearer sense without quite being precise either. It's a very nice, openly suggestive poetic image associating the woman and her admirers with horses and bridles. And these are the words printed in the lyric section of Cohen's official site. But I just noticed that in Stranger Music he has printed "bells" and "rain."

I don't know if that's a bit of nodding or a genuine variation, leaning toward a more surreal first image.

I prefer the discipline of "rein" (pun intended), but I don't dislike "rain." The image of bells fastened to the rain is musical and lovely, in part because it's not precisely rational or anchored in context.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that.

L.

 

Here is the poem by Lorca that Cohen claimed "gave him permission" to find a voice as a poet, when he came upon it randomly in a translation he found in a Montreal bookstore as a young man. I think it was on his mind when he composed the final verse of "Take This Longing." This is the poem he quotes from in the acceptance speech that PhantomStranger posted last week as part of his expression of gratitude to Lorca and to Spanish culture more generally:

“Gacela del Mercado Matutino” (from Diván del Tamarit [The Tamarit Divan], poems written 1931-43, pub. 1940)

Through the Arch of Elvira
I want to see you go,
So that I can learn your name
and break into tears.

What gray moon at nine o’clock
drained the blood from your cheek?
Who takes in your seed,
burst of flame in the snow?
What needle of a cactus,
small murders your crystal?

Through the Arch of Elvira
I want to see you go,
So that I can drink in your eyes
and break into tears.

What cries to punish me
You raise in the market!
What a carnation, estranged,
in the mounds of wheat!
How far when I am next to you!
How near, when you depart!

Through the Arch of Elvira
Let me see you go,
So that I can feel your thighs
and break into tears.

Note: “Gacela” is Spanish for ghazal, a lyric verse form common in Persian poetry.

Quoted from Federico García Lorca, Collected Poems, rev. edition, ed. Christopher Maurer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002). Not the translation Cohen actually read. I'm not sure which one that was.

L.

 

Lorca was a huge influence on Leonard Cohen. We'll hear the Spanish poet's name again when we get around to the 1980s and discuss Take This Waltz. Cohen supposedly slaved writing Take This Waltz as a tribute to Lorca, spending more time on it than any other song he's ever written.

I've misheard lyrics before, sometimes going years before discovering the intended truth. It's always shattering in a small way to find out what you thought was in the song is a mere figment of your imagination.

 

Yes. I still stubbornly hold onto the idea that Dylan sings, "split up on the dock at night," in "Tangled Up in Blue," rather than "split up on a dark, sad night."

Lorca is everywhere in Cohen's work. He's the one who opened the door to the banquet. He sent the invitation, set the table, explained what could be done and how to do it.

L.

 

That should be "split up on the docks at night." Hasty typing....

L.

 

I thought that was the line as well!

 

It's so much better that way, isn't it?

L.

 

“Lover Lover Lover” and “Who By Fire”

OK, so now we come to the two “religious” songs on the album. I put that in quotation marks because while the language and imagery of the two songs is rooted in particular religious traditions, both liturgical and devotional, the songs are not in any clear or simple ways expressions of religious faith. They are in constitutive ways ambiguous, and they use their ambiguity to express a kind of ambivalence (not the same, I think, as agnosticism—and certainly not atheism).

“Lover Lover Lover” is, I think, a very important song in the story of Cohen’s development as an artist. It’s far from the first time he’s concerned himself with religious material or used images drawn from the Bible and from various eastern traditions (that’s something that goes all the way back to his first book of poems, Let us Compare Mythologies), but I do think that it’s the first poem or song that actually (at least in one way we can understand the song) expresses religious yearning directly. The song takes a psalmic, rather than a prophetic stance (most of the earlier poems lean to the prophets when they engage the Bible), and there’s no standing at a pronominal distance from the idea of giving one’s self over to devotion, as in “Suzanne.” Here the song presents a singer yearning for, actually directly asking for redemption. There’s ambiguity, as I said, and as we’ll see it’s not perfectly clear whether the singer prefers a divine or a fleshly object for his yearning—but that’s of course a standard ambiguity in the devotional tradition that the song draws on (Cohen didn’t invent it, although he gives it his own original, modern shading). The song is I believe the first direct engagement in Cohen’s work with that tradition, on which he will draw more and more often—and even more directly—over the next several decades.

Here’s the lyric as it’s printed on the official site, and how it’s sung on the album:

I asked my father,
I said, “Father change my name.”
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
with fear and filth and cowardice and shame.

Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me,
yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover come back to me.

He said, “I locked you in this body,
I meant it as a kind of trial.
You can use it for a weapon,
or to make some woman smile.”

Yes and lover, lover, lover….

“Then let me start again,” I cried,
“please let me start again,
I want a face that's fair this time,
I want a spirit that is calm.”

Yes and lover, lover, lover….

“I never never turned aside,” he said,
“I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
it was you who covered up my face.”

Yes and lover, lover, lover….

And may the spirit of this song,
may it rise up pure and free.
May it be a shield for you,
a shield against the enemy.

Yes and lover, lover, lover….

Yes and lover, lover, lover….

The first thing worth noticing about the structure of the song in this version (I’ll discuss later variations, below), aside from its eastern feel and its rhythmic insistence, is the way that the first four verses very clearly unfold as a dialogue between the singer and a figure he refers to as “Father,” while the choruses and final verse float free from that dialogue. In other words, it’s clear who’s singing what (or who said what) in each of the first 4 verses, but it’s not clear just who sings the chorus and the final verse, and it’s not clear to whom those verses are addressed.

Leaving aside the chorus, for now, let’s trace how the song originally unfolded on the album version. In the first verse, the singer recalls how he, in a state of considerable distress, at some point called out to this figure he calls “Father,” asking for a new name to replace the one he had been bearing up to that point, presumably since birth, when it was conferred on him by this “father.” He seems to be confessing that he had debased his name with his “fear,” with “filth and cowardice and shame.” Then the chorus intervenes, followed by an answer from the “Father,” who the singer tells us told him that he had “locked” the singer in his body, or we might say in the general mortal condition of human being, in order to test him. He “meant it as a kind of trial.” The use of that phrasing suggests an almost appalling experimentalism on that part of this “father,” who at this point is sounding an awful lot like the less than omniscient divinity we encounter in the more archaic parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. He had an intention, but he doesn’t seem all that certain about it’s coming off the way he’d hoped. Perhaps he didn’t expect to get a pained request like this from his creature; perhaps this was because he thought his intentions had been clear enough. “A kind of trial,” furthermore, suggests, even more unnervingly, that the divinity wasn’t even sure that that’s what it was, or at least he didn’t know what sort trial it was—what purpose it had. That’s a striking way to have the deity speak, given that so much of the Judeo-Christian tradition is predicated on the idea that a very specific sort of trial is exactly what makes human existence meaningful (a trial of faith, whether in Christ’s saving sacrifice or the law’s efficacy as a way of aligning the human will with God’s will). Then the “Father” says, even more strangely, that this uncertain testing gave and still gives the singer two choices: he can use this body he’s been locked into for violence or to give pleasure. These are related to, but hardly identical with, the ways in which at least the normative Western monotheisms see the trial of being in a mortal body. The “weapon” could suggest morally problematic violence (the sin of wrath, the use of violence for unjust coercion or theft, rape, etc.) or it could suggest more legitimate forms (violence in the service of a just cause or divine command or in self-defense). Making a woman smile suggests sexual pleasure or anything else one might do with a body to make a woman, or anyone, smile—talk, joke, take a pratfall, do a magic trick, etc…). These gestures can be motivated by a selfish desire for sexual pleasure or praise, etc., or by a more generous desire simply to give pleasure, to please for its own sake. As the deity’s uncertain language suggests, as a test it’s not a particularly clear one (how do you know which is the right choice, what exactly are you choosing between and why?—or is it that judging that on a case-by-case basis the heart of the trial)?

In any case, in the 3rd verse the singer tells us how he reacted. He seems to have taken in what the Father had to say, and feels that he had made the wrong choices, using his body maybe for both purposes, but in the wrong ways, so he asks for another chance at the test: “Please let me start again,” he cried, and then cried again. He seems to have understood that he can’t change his identity, which is in some way essential to the body into which he has been locked. So he wants to start again in that body, but on better terms, with a fair face and calm spirit—the lack of which he seems to have blamed for his fear, filth, cowardice, and shame. Maybe, as we'll see, because he wants the lover he pleads with in the choruses to come back.

In the fourth verse, the Father responds—or maybe he doesn’t. He doesn’t seem to have registered the new request at all and simply tells the speaker, in terms right out of the prophetic tradition and the strain of Christian thought that derives from it, that he had always been there, but that the singer had—at least up to this moment of desperation—lost touch with him through a standard kind of idolatry, the substitution of the “temple” (ritual, earthly institutions) for a direct relationship to God. This, it would seem, from the father’s/God’s perspective, to be the true root of the problem, the sense of alienation from self and creator that the singer seems to be suffering. He ignores the request for a second chance, either because he won’t give it or because he’s trying to say that it isn’t necessary. Within the normative traditions from which Cohen derived this dialogue, the answer to that question is almost invariably the latter, but I’m not sure that the song is so clear on that—at least not in this version. And in any case, it still ends up saying that the choices of the trial don't (and never did) matter. That suggests a particularly radical version of the devotional traditions, an antinomian strain, and I can see why Cohen might have been drawn to it.

The dialogue either stops at that point, and the last verse seems to be sung by a different voice or by a singer who, for some reason that’s not explained, is able to give a kind of blessing to others, although to whom is not clear. Either that or it is sung by the father/God, telling his creature that the spirit in which he has come to him, called to him in the song, is the key to the way out of the problem, an expression of the requisite desire.

In its original autobiographical context, as Cohen himself mentioned many times on the tours of 74-76, this last verse was to be understood as addressed to both the Israeli and Egyptian armies, a wish to them that they survive what I guess we could identify as their collective decisions to use their bodies as weapons, rather than as vehicles for love. Cohen wrote an early version of the song while he was in Israel and Sinai performing for Israeli troops during the 1973 war.

But it’s also at this point that we need to take into consideration the other utterance of the song, the chorus with its opening affirmative, “yes,” followed by its repeated, urgent plea to someone called “lover” to return. At the end of the song in the original version that chorus can seem like a plea to those fighting armies to turn away from violence and back to love. But before that it picks up very difference resonances. The first time the chorus intervenes—and in it Cohen’s voice is as always in performances and recordings of the song joined by a chorus of back-up singers—it’s not clear who is singing these lines or to whom. The presence of the other singers is important to the effect here—it makes the plea feel collective, rather than individual. It’s not just the lonely, shameful singer of the verses crying out to his “father/God,” but one human being among many crying out and pleading for the lover to return. But who is the lover? The plea can be seen as a continuation of the singer’s request to the being he once called “father,” but whom he now perhaps addresses as “lover.” It can also be addressed by the father/God to his son/creature, a call to him to return the way he makes clear in the 4th verse he always could have by putting aside his idolatry and self-loathing and dissolve it all in the creator’s or his father’s love. The creature or the creator is called to as “lover” seven times, once for each day of creation and the Sabbath.

In the first of these two readings, the chorus suggests an ongoing human desire and a divine invitation, and the song becomes just an instance of recognition of that (and the unity of the two possibilities), a song that tells the story of the singer’s coming to that recognition. And perhaps that’s what empowers the final blessing verse, making important sense of the past tense in which the story of how the singer once cried to his “father” is told. Now he hears him calling, “lover,” or calls him that himself. Again, this reading of the song is reinforced by the 1979 revision (see below).

But there’s another way of reading the song in the original 1973-6 version. The dialogue of the first 4 verses remains an uneasy dialogue between a creature and his creator, but the chorus can detach itself from that or associate itself with it differently. It could be heard as a plea on the part of the singer, along with the other human beings who sing with him, to simply another human lover, or the idea of such a lover, an expression of desire, sexual, fleshly, and entirely human. In that sense, it can be heard as a kind of counter to the dialogue that unfolds in the verses, as if it didn’t and still doesn’t matter what God said. No matter how much engagement the singer shows with his God, no matter how trying or ultimately hospitable and loving that God is, the singer's real concerns remain with his human desires, with his lover who has left. This may be the Temple in which he really worships, hiding God’s face still. I don’t think the song is a rejection of that God in this reading, but it is a statement about the singer’s primary concern, his not being able or willing to escape material desires, even if they lead still to “fear and filth and cowardice and shame.” “Once I pleaded with my God,” the singer says, “and he told me something that might have solved my problem, but I didn’t like that conclusion or I realized that it was no solution, after all, and that in desire I use my body both as weapon and to make women smile. All there is is ‘lover lover lover.’” Nothing else is.

Or perhaps it’s a version of a desire and desolation similar to the one Chris Bell so poignantly expressed in his stunning song, “I am the Cosmos:”

Every night I tell myself,
I am the cosmos, I am the wind,
But that don’t get you back again.

“Lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, lover, come back to me.” The ambiguity created by the chorus is sustained through the main 4 verses, the urgency of the pleading casting out in all directions, amping-up each time, and climaxing with the repetition of the refrain we get at the end, which keeps repeating into the fade, suggesting that the pleading never really ends.

In this reading, the fifth verse retains the sense of a pleading with the armies that Cohen claimed to plead for and plead with, men and women who have turned away from the trials of love and turned instead to the war of weapons. In that sense the song in this original version can even seem in the end a general plea for love by one singer and many singers on behalf of all humanity, locked as we are in this body and struggling not to obscure our names, to pass our tests, to use our bodies in the right ways.

The revised version, which Cohen introduced during the 1979 tour, sometimes retains that verse and adds the following new one (sometimes the new verse only replaces the original fifth verse, and Cohen also sometimes ends the song with one or the other, sometimes with a repetition of the first verse). He almost always includes this verse in performance now. In fact, the whole approach that Cohen now takes to the song, verbally and musically, including the long oud or archilaud taksim at the beginning, was forged on the 1979 tour, although he created an almost reggae version dominated by electric guitar, during the mid 1980’s tours, but even then he included the new verse):

You may come to me in happiness
Or you may come to me in grief
You may come to me in deepest faith
Or you may come in disbelief

Is this the singer, here, singing this to his human lover or to his God? Or is this the father/God singing to His creature? In the former reading it might uneasily suggest a kind of abject or a generous come on (an early version of "I'm Your Man," or a version of the play on lying in some of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets), but the latter reading makes better, clearer sense. It becomes, or seems meant as, an immensely comforting message to the insecure creature: "know that all you need is a desire to return and you can, you will return." You don’t need to start again, you don’t need a new name. It doesn’t matter if you’re driven by thankfulness for the good things you have, by grief over loss or other forms of suffering; it doesn’t matter if you come because you believe there’s someone to receive you or despite the fact that you don’t. The radical hospitality of this father/lover/God is available no matter what. All you need is to want it. And that is what the singer could also be saying to the armies or the audiences he addresses in the “may the spirit of this song” verse.

This way of understanding the song is even more explicitly invited in the most recent versions, in which Cohen changes the opening of the choruses from “Yes, and lover, lover lover…” to “He said, lover, lover, lover…,” stabilizing the ambiguity of the song and making it far more clear that the chorus repeats the God’s call to his beloved, ashamed creature.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this verse was introduced during the 1979 tour. This is the beginning, after all, of a period stretching from Recent Songs through Various Positions and Book of Mercy in which Cohen would explore these religious, specifically devotional, themes intensively, something he would do both in more muted ways and in ways just as direct on later records as well. This engagement is really the keynote of the next chapter in the story, once Cohen finished composing what we might call his “marriage cycle,” the love songs on New Skin and all the songs on Death of a Ladies Man, plus the poems/commentaries of Death of a Lady’s Man. But more about all of that when we get to all of that.

“Who by Fire” is a somewhat different animal, but this post is already very long, so I’ll say more about the other song separately.

L.

 

A terrific version of "Lover Lover Lover" from the 1979 tour (the Field Commander Cohen set). Fantastic oud solos by John Bilezikjian on this version and the new verse:



L.

 

It's my understanding that Lover Lover Lover was initially written for the Israeli soldiers during the 1973 conflict. I think Leonard Cohen is indirectly identifying with the plight of those Jewish men in the song. Is it a greater metaphor for the role played between Father (Israel) and soldier? I think it can be taken that way. That Field Commander Cohen version is great, one of my favorites.

From humble beginnings...the first known recording of Suzanne, a year before Leonard Cohen or Judy Collins would perform it. It is by the Stormy Clovers, a group that played some of Cohen's music at coffee houses and the like across Canada before his album came out.